Qui Transtulit Sustinet
by skywalker05
Summary: You can't know everything. You can't know the bureaucratic appointments, the warzones, the precise, greedy ambition that will entrap the friends that will outlive you. But you've held your finger on the pulse of a sentience-spawning science experiment fueled by grief. If you can't know everything, you can come really, really close. CT and the Chairman, in the light of season 12.
1. Chapter 1

CT pinpointed the two Charon guards as soon as the door opened. She wedged the barrel of her pistol against someone's chest armor, and pointed a serrated knife at the other's forehead. The woman on the other end of the knife had long black hair, greasy and matted, and the cigarette in her left hand hesitated halfway to the lighter in her right. It didn't take her long to back into the prefab control room, all red lights and black metal bleeding into a brown blur the same color as CT's armor.

The man slapped her hand away, but either she or he caught the edge of the pistol on the side of his armor and he flinched from the metallic tink sound. It spooked her too, but she took the opportunity; she kicked out and hit him over the left ear with the ridged side of her boot. He hit the ground fast, and CT regained her balance before her foot touched the floor.

The door opened, its edges indistinct in the darkness until her helmet light flared. The woman circled her shoulders and cracked her neck, staring at CT from under her dark brown visor. From the hallway, the Charon shift leader said, "Stand down."

The guard did, lowering her fists. The cigarette and lighter lay catty-corner at her feet. She looked at the other man, worry evident in her slumped posture. CT stepped toward the computer console in the corner of the room to give her a clearer path.

"I'm sorry they attacked you," the Leader said, his helmet on and a gun at his side. "We're all on edge, with the raid."

"It's a raid." CT magnetized her pistol to her leg, shoved the knife back into the slot on her arm. "Of course you are."

"We knew they were coming, but not with a lot of time. I had to make a lot of decisions because of your people, Connie." Engines roared outside, with the staccato sound of tires sticking in muddy tracks.

"They're looking for weapons," CT said.

"We don't have heavy arms here. This is an R&D lab."

She sighed. What did the Director want more than ideas, stolen and cannibalized? Tanks and rocket launchers couldn't do the kind of damage he did just by touching something, saying a word to someone. "They don't know. The Director doesn't even tell them what they're looking for."

The Leader didn't incline his helmet when he looked at her, just maintained the same kind of hyper-focus he had when he needed to keep his head in the frame because they were talking on a tiny screen. "Good. Let them be disorganized. Means I get paid to do an easier job."

CT cocked her head, latching on to the part of that sentence that didn't add up. "Don't you get combat pay?"

"Only up to eight hours. We're technically contractors, even though most of us are used to working for a UNSC salary."

"It beats the bureaucracy blinding itself," the woman with the cigarette said. She had placed the lighter on the table, and held the lit cigarette in shaking fingers. "You'll be lucky if that committee queues you up in a year."

The truth of that angered CT. "The Freelancers aren't disorganized. Don't underestimate how quickly we can think on our feet. I'm getting used to a violent welcome from Charon."

"It's what happens when no one's supposed to know you're working for the cool team." The Leader turned to the guards, opening his arms as if to show off the crowded room. "Doctor Church's squad will be looking for heavy weapons emplacements and vehicles. Tell the troopers to make it look like we have them," he said, harsh and efficient. He ran his security team like the military that CT had, once, believed he belonged to.

"The Freelancers aren't on to you, though," she said. "They think we're fighting some new cell every time. Maybe you should leave more Charon coffee cups around."

The Leader gave one phlegmy laugh. His sealed drop suit creaked as his shoulders shook.

CT interrupted before he could say anything else. The attack would reach this building soon. "Did you do your research about the Oversight Subcommittee?"

"Were they part of early UNSC training? Back when we were doing desk work?"

"Maybe. They're in charge of investigating whistleblowers," CT said.

"So you think you should talk to them?"

"Yes, like I said. In order to get in touch with them, you're support to reach out to Malcolm Hargrove, the assistant to the chairman. I looked him up on the UNSC network. It's easy to get in touch with him, but the Director is watching my signals going out."

The building shook. CT heard a thud as the power was cut. The female guard hurried to the console, which only dimmed before what must have been an emergency generator dragged it back on. The male approached the door, which rattled enough that he jerked his head back.

"That name sounds familiar," the Leader said.

CT drew her knife and pointed it at the Leader, the serrated edge down, the heavy, balanced handle laying loosely in her palm.

"Get out of here." She traced the blade through the air and pointed at the other woman. "Someone will die in here if that door opens."

Another, closer explosion hit. Dust plumed up from the floor, and CT recognized the hollow thunk of a rocket launcher. It was probably either South or Tex out there, and if the Director had dropped Tex, than it was likely that she was the one who knew about the R&D.

"You go." He looked nervously at the door behind her, and drew a battle rifle from his back. "We're here for this."

"I thought you said you weren't paid enough."

"Sometimes it's personal. Meet your ... the others around the back."

She disagreed so much that she tightened her fingers on the knife, but there wasn't time to argue, and she couldn't risk being seen turning her back to the Charon troopers. "Okay. Be careful."

The door exploded. The crumpled top edge caught the male guard on his chest and folded over, slamming him into the back wall. Another shot took out half the console and half of CT's beeping shield. The surviving guard fired over her, blood welling on her exposed face, until CT stood up and turned around. She let her knife go, and the blade pinned the woman's hand holding the cigarette to the console, wedged between the chunks of metal fallen from the wall. The blood drained from her face, giving her betrayed expression the pale patchiness of an old bruise.

North and South stepped into the room, dust pluming around them. South was holding a rocket launcher tube high on her right shoulder. Outside, CT saw tire-chewed dirt and the mountainous landscape surrounding the Charon offices. North shot the guard from a few feet away with a sniper rifle. The gun kicked across CT's field of vision, and the body of the woman she had gotten killed slumped against her arm. She shoved it off, wrenched the knife back, and whipped her head around to see the door frame empty behind her, the Leader gone. The guard fell to the floor. North and South were almost-identical and motionless.

"Thanks," CT said. She could hear her own breath coming short, but that would match any story she came up with. "There's no sign of weapons stored back here."

"No kidding," South said, looking around the sparse room. "Did you look for hidden rooms or any of that crap?"

"I'm a computer security expert, not a freaking sapper," CT said, hoping she sounded amused. "And the computers are now buried."

It must have worked, because South punched her shoulder hard enough that CT had to regain her center of gravity. "Not a bomb defuser either." She looked at North. "There are no caches outside. This is turning out to look like a huge mistake."

"So what do we do?" CT said.

"Keep working," North said.

CT nodded. "I'm with you."

Outside, York and Maine had mostly cleaned up the base. Some Insurrectionists fled, York said, and by the time 479 circled around toward them Maine had revealed what CT already knew: that the base was administrative and had no heavy weapons emplacements, no war vehicles. CT wondered who was going to come in next and pull whatever information the Director wanted, and whether it had anything to do with the Engineer that was to break Alpha.

She had been tracking where the Director purchased his equipment as best she could through increasingly obscured UNSC records. Church had begun adding misnomers and ghost accounts, trusting in his relatively small project. What had once been on the cutting edge had been, many years ago, put on the back burner in favor of brute-force boots on the ground and Mantis mechs.

The supply lanes and questions kept her from thinking too much about the dead woman, or about how neatly South turned to her after they left the building.

"Did you see the Leader?" South said.

"He was inside."

"You were inside too. Didn't you see his beacon?"

"I did. But you and North knocked the wall down on top of us."

"She'll grab quicker next time," North said, and South bristled against his conciliatory tone.

CT felt that comment sink under her skin and join all the others.

She rode the Pelican home, and in the barracks slept with her back pressed against the wall. In another room, York and North talked about music and the day and whether they were the good guys.


	2. Chapter 2

"I killed a woman."

"The intel on that mission was supposed to be right on. I guess you can't account for FILSS and plain old people changing things."

CT watched Alpha pace above the table in the briefing room. If she narrowed her eyes, she could see the tiny blue lines of the hologram in which he had chosen to confine himself. The little grid sat under the bold-faced map above them, the United States neon and fault-lined.

FILSS said, "I heard that." She was bodiless and prim, looking down on the small room like an invisible sun.

"Why are you telling me?" Alpha asked.

CT did not say, as she had not said the first time she had a conversation like this with him, that she was testing his emotional baseline.

**The First Time**

_She had dropped the ball. She had learned that Alpha was glib and dismissive in response to his agents' distress, although not without something of a facade. He was designed to be emotionally attached to his soldiers, because that would help him make decisions that would best help those soldiers survive. _

_AI couldn't lie, but they could choose not to tell the truth._

_That time, she had researched the voice commands that the Director used to control Alpha, to access his more basic functions. Without the Director's voice, many would not work. The audio cue was a simple lock that CT couldn't crack even if she had been York. She could press Alpha in ways he wasn't used to, though, not so much a brute collapse of his walls but a judo hold that used his own genius against him. She spoke to the root menu, and Alpha barely noticed some of her questions. _

_But he had never dwelled on the dead soldier, never become stressed. Later, she thought that he might have been very relieved that she was still alive._

In the briefing room, she kept her arms beside her for the slight-of-hand trickery she was about to use.

"Alpha. Report."

"Ship at 100 percent integrity. Shields stable, slipspace drive humming along. Everything a-ok, Agent Connecticut."

"Alpha, access timestamp 1300."

"Accessing."

He played back for her conversations between agents and between the Director and Carolina. Some recordings, he said, were restricted to Director-level access. CT recorded the intervals of these and kept on asking, bringing Alpha back and back through hours, realizing that she couldn't listen for as long as she might need. Her methods must be random as well as precise. Alpha never complained about her repetitive orders, never asked why she wanted the limited recordings of his life that he could give her. Here in the accesses near the root he might not be able to ask that.  
>Finally she found, as she rewound, the false memory among the real ones.<p>

She knew it was false because it was narrated by Alpha alone, with no other voices involved in his casual, calculating story, and she knew it was false because York died in it.

The next was the part she felt dirty about. It was not lost on her that she was using Alpha for her own gains as surely as the Director was, no matter how noble and imperative her distant end result. Alpha would remember this access if she did anything more than listen.

CT said, "Poor York."

That was enough.

"I _try_," Alpha said. "I've always tried, even when she..."

CT said, into the silence, "She?"

"Allison. Restricted access, promoted access. Contradictory instruction." He paused. "She was so cold."

After that it was a digital cascade, a tirade that made CT's skin prickle on her arms and around her neural implant. As if Alpha's grief could jump into her, knocking palms and knuckles against the transparent wall between AI and natural thoughts until blood was sponged onto the glass.

She smudged a tear off her cheek with her fingers. "I'm sorry."

Neither Alpha nor FILSS answered. 

* * *

><p>She returned to the mess hall dizzied, fluish from the wreckage her three carefully placed words had caused. Wanted to eat to remind herself that she was a whole, functioning system. In part, her new connection to the knowledge forced out of Alpha fed the introverted pride in her. If she could not be on the leaderboard, at least she could be behind it. But again she saw that image of bulletproof, entrapping glass. She had expected to find something, not someone, messing with the emotional programming at Alpha's core. There was little doubt that Allison had impassioned and hurt Alpha, but was she mother, programmer, friend, or something else?<p>

It would be some time until she discovered that Allison was the Director's as much as she was Alpha's.

CT took her tray to the nearest table.

South nearly shoulder checked her on the way past with her own food.

"Where were you?" South said over her shoulder, talking with her mouth full.

"Where were you?" North asked as South slammed a tray down on the mess table, a bite already taken out of the white flesh of the apple rolling between her cup and a baloney sandwich. CT took the path of least resistance to an open patch of bench past a rapidly eating, hunched Carolina.

"Internals." South took another bite, splashing apple juice around her mouth.

Carolina gave South an unreadable look. CT felt her own shoulders tense. South was taller than both of them, although Carolina had a wider frame, and even though North on the opposite bench was a neutral party, CT felt penned in.

Maybe it was that feeling that drove a long-withheld protest out of her. "Does anyone else feel like this is overkill? Being watched all the time.."

"Cute," South said. "Activism isn't really relevant when somebody could be trying to stab us in our sleep, Connie."

"We're watched at all times normally," Wash said. "That's what FILSS does, right? It's how warships are run."

"Stop it, CT," Carolina said. At least she looked at South with flashing green eyes, a sharp reminder that CT's name had changed. "The Director needs us all to do our jobs." She glanced at Wash too, and CT remembered staring at his and North's backs after the grenade hit York, watching Wash backpedal. The Director's orders reverberated through Carolina and Wash especially strongly. Wash's need for order CT understood; Carolina's quiet, unhappy loyalty less so. That was bolstered up by the leaderboard, CT thought. If Carolina didn't fight so hard for the top spot, she wouldn't stake so much on the system that created it.

South wolfed down her sandwich like it was her mission. North's concerned glances over his small bites made CT feel like she was under a spotlight. As she ate, keeping her eyes on the pockmarked tray and the lacunae in the bread, she tried to convince herself that the spotlight was, today, on South. The Director hadn't necessarily been talking about CT.

_You've always been hard on yourself._

Sometimes, she had to be in order to be right.

When CT left the mess hall, Carolina followed her out. For a moment it was a race in slow motion, CT silently trying to put enough distance between them that Carolina would have to run or shout at her and reveal her desperation to keep up.

It didn't work. Carolina said, "CT, stop."

CT did. Carolina's voice was as controlled and firm as if she were ordering CT not to step into a minefield. Her mask looked up at CT with yellow eyes glinting.

"What did I do, boss?" CT said, heavy with sarcasm.

Carolina reached out for a moment as if to pat her on the shoulder before dropping her hand and turning the movement into a placating gesture. "I'm telling you this for your own good. The Director is trying to flag people he sees as potentially causing trouble. You're smarter than this, CT." She was halting, choosing words carefully. CT tried to think of the ones she wasn't saying, the thousand synonyms for sub-par and dangerous, calmly acknowledging that Carolina spoke the truth.

"Carolina?" CT said.

Carolina just barely turned her head.

"I'm just trying to make sure we're still the good guys."

Giving York's words back to her might soften Carolina a little. If it worked, she didn't show it, and CT straightened up, moving away from the wall as if it was toxic.

CT tried, as a rule, not to lie about her tactful omissions. She had tried not to shake under her squad leader's gaze. She tried.

Later, she hooked her tablet to one of FILSS' conduits and used a text-based communication system so old that the AI might not even recognize it. The Charon Leader's words came through in blue letters made of stretched hexagons, stacked into something readable, but still just spears if she looked at them right. It took time for the two of them to stabilize the transmission, to fix all the roadblocks and human errors that communication required. When she felt she knew the program, when she had double-checked the ideas that had lead her to this parasitic, antique carrier in the first place, she got to the point.

The point smudged, grayed out, obscured by the necessity of secrecy. Don't use the agent's full names, not even code names. Don't use locations. Redact your own words before you speak them.

What was left was just her goal and her desires.

"I've got to get out of here. They're going to know soon." The program kept up with her quick keystrokes and sent the Leader's replies fast, even though he was at a far away, unknown distance. The presence of the words on the screen accused her. They were an artifact the Director could dig up; not dusty bones but a bloody corpse threatening that he was next -

The Leader said, "Don't worry."

"I know exactly when I should start worrying." This wasn't a hunch, wasn't a feeling of disappointment. She lived with disappointment until it was just a background murmur, but now there were facts laid out in front of her, clearly on the roster of Internal Affairs.

The Leader moved on, but she had a feeling that he still had his hackles up.

"Connie, I have good news. I've asked around."

"Who? Who have you asked?" The spotlight on her, the gooseflesh on her back.

"One of the other shift leaders. She said that Hargrove knows Rhee Sebial."

"The man from the freeway?"

"Yes. He was Mr. Sebial's mentor on a R&D project a long time ago, something about cryogenics."

"Which is one of Charon's specialities."

"It's not one of their priorities, but what they have is military-grade and probably experimental. That's above my pay grade."

Static cracked in the line, and CT flinched so hard that her foot, stretched out in front of her, clanged against the wall. The fear seemed to rise up through her and drain out like something flowing along with her blood.

"What happened?" the Leader said.

CT leaned back toward the keyboard. "Nothing."

"What?"

"It's really nothing. The Oversight Subcommittee is our first priority now, and it takes just a push of a button to get to him as long as we act before anything else happens. The situation here has gone too far."

She couldn't express to him the Alpha she had seen, the fingers scraping across glass, unable to bleed although they would have been torn from his entrapment if the Alpha had been human.

"Yes," the Leader said, his noise of assent probably translated, because he was typing as quickly as he could, into one word too curt for him.

"But not yet. I have more to do here."

"What?"

"Things I need to put in place, to make sure that when it falls down some innocent people don't go with it."

This time, his silence felt less like assent and more like judgement.

**Things CT needed to put in place: **

_The placement of a copy of the data in someone's hands, probably Tex. Wash would turn it in before reading it, and it would hurt Carolina. _

_Continued attempts to find a way to tell Alpha, without the Director knowing, what was being done to him._

_Investigation into the identities of the individuals on the Oversight Subcommittee, some of which was best done on a UNSC ship instead of a private one._

_Allison._

_And some kind of closure for her emotional ties._

She typed to the Leader's unresponsiveness, "Look, we have time. A little time."

"Don't you want to help us now?"

She stared at the words, at the authoritative neediness of them. "I have a plan," she said. "I've had the plan since this started."

"Ok," the Leader typed back.

"I'll get there."

"I know."

The cut the connection shortly after that, CT rolling up the cords she would never use again. She moved away from the metal walls and shadows she had jumped at, trying to digest everything, hearing Alpha scream with a scorched-red throat that did not exist.

And those ties, so analytically added to the list, beating like a heart _I want to stay I want to stay._


	3. Chapter 3

Malcolm Hargrove got the call while standing with his back to the wall of a church. He picked his phone out of his pocket with one hand and patted his wiry hair with the other. Still there. That was probably a good sign for a man of his genetic predisposition.

Mourners in business suits talked in small groups around him in the church parking lot. Summer sun shone like interrogation lights. Rhee Sebial's burial had been a smaller, more private ceremony than the one that had taken place for victims of the building collapse. Sebial's remains had been found, since he had been some distance away on a freeway. Some pundits speculated that he had been fleeing, that he had known about the attack in advance. Everyone that Hargrove spoke to denied those claims with an almost personal vehemence, the quick snappishness of the busy insider. Sebial had been commuting to a satellite office, they said. He had been doing his job.

Looking at his phone, Hargrove recognized not the call but the code. It was one of several attached to the woman he had been walking through processing, the one who'd taken a loose view of the scheduled extraction. He could not run the paperwork until she was ready, and he would not ignore the strange masses of proof that she had pushed at him from her ship's AI. The most easily prosecutable infraction committed by Leonard Church of Project FREELANCER was the possession of two AI, regardless of their origin. Hargrove's was not a scientific fascination.

His eye was caught by the line of dirt under his nail, and then the line of mourners still filing past the grave.

A woman emerged from the church, sliding long fingers across a black suitcase and snapping a gold clasp shut under a false button. Hargrove nodded at her and received a brown-eyed blink from under curly black bangs in return. Oversight Subcommittee Chairperson Ingrid D'Atombe was his and his colleagues' immediate superior, and while he had not worked in the subcommittee long enough to have interacted with her often, he found her to be a practical, aggressively authoritative woman. Malcolm Hargrove did not appreciate people trying to out-class him.

On his phone, the call faded and disappeared.

"Hello, ma'am," he said, and met the chairperson's eyes.

"Terrible thing," D'Atombe said, referring to the attack that lead to the funeral.

"Indubitably."

Perhaps she thought it would be unseemly to talk about the material loss at the funeral. She said, "How is your latest project? Joe from the personnel committee says there might be something brewing."

"The Forward Mobile Logistics Analysis is almost complete. My other latest project had in fact just called," said Hargrove, motioning with his phone. The chair did not give any indication whether she felt the business call to be unseemly. "It could be quite a storm if we can get something. He has two smart AI and one administrative program, I believe."

"Have you spoken with the administrator?"

"She isn't a smart AI. She falls within the morality protocol, does she not?" Hargrove said.

"Only enough to act as a second witness."

"Huh."

"I would try to find out more about her," the chair said.

"I will take that under advisement. And, my condolences," he said, realizing that he should have done some time ago, and she looked up at him with her hand again hovering protectively over her briefcase.

"I didn't know Rhee well. He always seemed around," D'Atombe said.

"A business genius at times, I've been told," Hargrove said, because it was true. "Very ambitious."

"I wouldn't say he was ambitious so much as consistently reached the standards imposed upon him," said D'Atombe imperiously. Hargrove was taken aback but did not show it, instead straightening the lapel that had begun to bend away from his suit.

D'Atombe said, "The Charon Corporation helped the military whenever we needed it. They function very much the way our office does, actually, in terms of management, if not production."

"Because they manufacture weapons?"

"Because they develop both weapons and ships. Rhee always stretched the company to achievable limits. Somehow, it never snapped back on him."

Hargrove glanced back at the vestibule.

"I'll leave you to your call," D'Atombe said.

Hargrove moved across the parking lot in order to take the call somewhere more quiet. Between the high wheels of a vehicle and the iron spikes surrounding a public park he returned the call, half expecting the agent not to pick up.

She didn't. A signal toned, over and over, like a call to arms.

* * *

><p>CT would wonder later whether FILSS had a flair for the dramatic. In what CT recognized as a more paranoid rumination, she wondered whether Carolina had been talking to FILSS about her after their confrontation in the hallway. Maybe the top Freelancer had asked FILSS to mother CT.<p>

FILSS turned the lights off as CT was walking down a hallway from armor processing to the gym. It was arms day, and maybe halfway through her reps she would enter that quiet, endorphin-filled state of not thinking about anything - the state in which she had some of her best ideas, saw some of the most unexpected connections. CT did her workouts because they were necessary to her job, not out of the pleasure Maine took in exercise or the self-flagellation Carolina made of it.

By now, CT had overheard the Director telling the Counselor that he did not care what Lord Hood thought of his operation. She had searched for and found the Director's data that he hadn't wanted anyone to find. She was carrying that on her shoulders now, looking around corners, feeling the prickling on her back like a child running up the stairs with the lights off down below.

FILSS spoke from a ceiling speaker. "Agent Connecticut. May I speak to you for a moment?"

The light four floor segments ahead of CT faded and went out. She tried to compose her voice to sound like Carolina's, because FILSS had always had a sororal fondness for Carolina that worked better than any command word.

She lifted her hands as if to take her helmet off, to stop the speakers from recording, but then thought that would incriminate her further.

CT said, "Of course, FILSS."

"There are some files which may be of interest to you in the armor lab."

CT narrowed her eyes. The light at the end of the hall flickered. "Of interest?"

"Yes. Are you not a computer security specialist? I am concerned about recent accesses."

"I'll take a look."

She walked through the patch of darkness quickly. FILSS had alerted her to such things before, and she had had to pass them on to the Director. This could have been an offshoot of one of tens of digital attacks the actual Insurrectionists launched against the UNSC in an effort to discover their plans or patterns. The armor lab held the nearest centrally yoked computer, as well as the armor processing rigs now hanging still and quiet,

"You have been tasked with monitoring the Freelancers' digital access," FILSS said.

That was a simplification, but true. "Yes."

"I have been authorized to inform you of any tampering. I'm afraid that my systems may have been tapped."

CT wondered whether the authorization meant that the Director had flagged one particular instance. Maybe her name or the Chairman's would come up next. She had been so thorough...

"The accesses were made by the UNSC Oversight Subcommittee. Of course, their permissions are extensive, but I found some of their questions disconcerting."

"Why not tell Carolina about this?" CT asked, intensely relieved. Oversight could still lead back to her, though. She needed to make sure that it did not, or at least, not until she had gotten away.

"She is not the information specialist." FILSS' prim voice rose slightly. "Unless you would rather I talk to her now."

"What questions disconcerted you?"

"I have provided the transcript."

CT read. Left to right, back and forth. After a few minutes she said, "He's investigating the Insurrectionists. Looking for the source of their funding. A lot of them are ex-military, but they're hired by this Charon Corporation..." Maybe her indrawn brows and angry tone would look like surprise to FILSS, and maybe they wouldn't. "And he looked into the damage we did, the freeway and the cryogenics station."

Both buildings had provided military ordinance. CT hadn't known where exactly Maine had gotten the gun he had brought to the Pelican after the heist, but before she finished the sentence she realized that that spoil of war, a Charon product, might have been destined for the UNSC all along.

But Oversight isn't supposed to be investigating that, CT thought, purposefully keeping her mouth shut, and then her breath caught again. She hadn't been thinking it because she had put the assistant to the chairman on the trail of the Director. She had been thinking it because, despite all the material damage they caused and all of the soft targets, she still thought of the Freelancers as good guys. As the white hats in the movies, with the townspeople just willing to put everything back together after the gun fight was over. She had wanted to protect them, even from their own military.

She let that thought go out in to the air. "But we're on their side."

FILSS said, "I found the investigation very rude."

More protestations crowded up behind CT's lips, but they were useless, and open to dangerous speculation if the Director suspected her. With the increased mentions of the Internal Affairs board, she thought that he did. Why had the Subcommittee gone around her and spoken to FILSS?

"Me too, FILSS," CT said. She felt her expression settle into her frown lines.

It didn't matter whether the Oversight Committee knew that Charon soldiers were not Insurrectionists. The UNSC did not have any jurisdiction over private companies. It could not, legally, start a war with them.

To CT, Charon was a way out. Its operations were the Leader's purview, the reluctant career of someone she considered her ally and friend.

But what if there was some other connection? Was the UNSC trying to protect something that would hinge on Charon's involvement? Did the committee think that Charon was working in tandem with Project Freelancer? The corporation was large; CT was not entirely sure of its scope, but she had not thought that she would need to be. The Leader served her purpose whether he fought for Charon or an Insurrectionist cell. Taking down the Director, freeing Alpha and whatever other AI might come from him - that was the key.

She needed to be very careful, to be smarter than the Director, to outplay. Luckily, he was aware of only half of the game pieces.

She said, "Director-level access, code bravo," and FILSS said nothing.

CT dictated a string of numbers that she had always intended to use.

FILSS repeated them back, and CT rubbed at the back of her own neck in a nervous gesture. "What did you say?"

"I believe I said that I found the investigation very rude."

CT nodded. "Have you showed this to the Director?" she asked.

"It is accessible in the records if he wishes to view it, but the Director is a very busy man, and may not reach it in time. That is why I wanted to show you."

"Get it across his desk when he has time," CT muttered, looking at the sharp, gray corner of the console.

"I will, Agent Connecticut."

CT looked up. "And FILSS?"

"Keep me updated if any other reports like this come in."

Later, she checked up on where FILSS had stored the records of both their communication and the Oversight Subcommittee's investigation. She would know where to find them next time. Only then did she feel some relief, that the subcommittee was doing what she wanted it to do - even if they were also more concerned with Charon than she had expected. That wouldn't hurt her.

Then, she called the assistant to the chairman, the one who had been her contact through the whole process. It was nearing her sleep cycle, and she called in a room where she often sat, with a window looking out at space. The small room was a psychological concession, an regulation respite for people who liked looking out at the stars. She used a comm she had found in the armory, and when she could not reach the assistant to the chairman, quietly destroyed its data and returned it there.


	4. Chapter 4

Hargrove kept looking. His missives to D'Atombe found her unresponsive after her initial support; while AI were under the Oversight Subcommittee's purview, she said, terroristic attacks were not. The Freelancer Project, Agent Connecticut had said, was attacking the so-called Insurrectionists instead of the other way around, which meant that Hargrove had hit a dead end on his investigations of either Leonard Church's operation or Charon's.

The next time he asked D'Atombe permission to travel in order to investigate something, she was reluctant. She called him into an office separated from his only by glass partitions. False transparency seemed an appropriate description for most of the investigation he was pursuing.

"I want to speak to someone at a Charon base which has not yet been attacked but seems likely to be," Hargrove said, his hands clasped behind him.

D'Atombe looked up from behind a cup of coffee. "I thought the UNSC project was the priority. Tell me again about it."

"He's trying to overwork his smart AI by inducing a split in it, creating a child program," Hargrove said. He scratched behind his ear, feeling his short hair.

"How? Wouldn't it just shut down? It's basically a computer." She blinked slowly. Hargrove hadn't expected such resistance in regards to the part of the project that had been already approved.

"The details are highly scientific and dull, but be assured, the results are twisted. AI have minds of their own," he said. "I can send you a deck with further details if you prefer."

In fact, the details weren't entirely clear, but were heavily classified by the Oversight Committee. Connecticut had been right about several things, and one of them was the value of the data. That data had been under heavier protection than Connecticut's real name.

"And what will you ask Charon?"

"What kind of ordinance Project Freelancer has used against them, and whether they have found any evidence of these unconventionally created artificial intelligence programs."

She nodded. "It is a long way to their nearest office."

"I have chosen one at which the administration, I felt, was confident that it would not be attacked, but which also sits in a vulnerable corridor. This should both almost ensure the safety of our endeavor and prevent us from appearing biased, or like a war coordinator."

"No, we have other people to do that," D'Atombe said, setting down the cup next to her slate. "Do it. Have Joe record your mileage on the way out."

"With all respect, ma'am, I will carry out those exact requests."

"Don't say 'with all respect," Hargrove. It's what people say when they're about to be vicious. Enjoy your trip."

He gaped for a moment, then closed his mouth and smiled tightly. "Ma'am."

He left, and took the next acquiescing UNSC ship to the base nearest the Charon outpost he had chosen.

It was planetside, a large corporate office beside a warehouse. The office manufactured weapons components, according to the details available on the public net, but he knew in fact that there were handguns assembled on the premises, if nothing else. This office was also responsible for some of Charon's cryogenics operations. The receptionist assured him that the corporate manager would be available in a moment, so Hargrove stood looking between his own suited reflection in the silver floor and the hologram of the company logo. By the time she appeared, he had begun to think about Charon's UNSC contracts and their practice of hiring ex-military, something unremarked-upon but not secret. Charon was not, in the broad scheme of things, one of the corporate giants of the world - other tech giants had firmer footholds in the human economy, although Charon dominated the regional one...

When the manager appeared she was walking fast, and hit Hargrove with a handshake that almost hurt. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting." She had short, dark hair, heavy costume jewelry, and a lined face. "Someone was trying to host this slipnet video on our servers and it slowed everything down."

Hargrove raised an eyebrow. "Unfortunate."

"It's all right now. I'm Linda." She leaned forward so that he thought she might subject him to the handshake again. "You'll actually be speaking to one of our security shift leaders about the attack on the tower."

"As long as they are aware that this is under the upmost secrecy."

"Of course." She started walking, and he followed slightly behind her as they moved through wood-lined hallways. The many intersecting corridors disoriented him instantly.

"Conspiracy theories have already arisen about the attacks," Linda said.

"Is that so?"

"Some people say it was a military experiment, some people say that..." She hesitated, for the first time appearing less rushed and more uncertain. "The office is in here."

"Is it, now."

Linda turned around and met his eyes. "We're an above the board operation, chairman."

"That's assistant to the chairperson. Are you concerned about appearing otherwise? We're simply corroborating evidence presented to us in a case entirely unrelated to your corporation."

"That's reassuring."

She opened a door. The conference room was empty, with a long oval table in the middle like the iris of an eye. When she turned back to him it was with more composure than she had had before, which likewise lowered his hackles; he had not wanted to have to manage a company crisis. She said, "You'll be talking to one of our shift chiefs on the security team, Joshua Harrington."

The windows were frosted white, and seemed to glare at him as Linda sat down. Hargrove took a seat beside her without being asked. "Has Harrington been briefed?"

"He knows that you want to talk about the attacks on our operations in space."

Hargrove nodded.

The signal caught quickly, just audio and blue holographic text noting the coordinates of the signal's origin.

Linda said, "Are you there, chief?"

"Hi ma'am, this is Harrington."

"I have the assistant to the chairperson here." She leaned over the microphone. "And you know this is classified. Everyone knows. This does not leave the room."

That wasn't even entirely true, Hargrove knew. He would, by necessity, share the information with the chairperson and the rest of his department, if necessary. None of them seemed interested in inclining an ear that way, but if they did, he would worry about allocating those resources in as secure a manner as possible later on.

"What did you see, Harrington?"

The voice sounded young and energetic. "What else did any of us see? Rhee Sebial was at the tower. You know that. We think the same group attacked a cryogenics facility a few weeks earlier, but that's all."

Hargrove asked for details.

As he went down the list, he found that the story corroborated Connecticut's in both fact and in that both groups blamed each other. If Connecticut was to be believed, Leonard Church had orchestrated that confusion simply by telling the Freelancers in no uncertain terms that their foes were Insurrectionists. The Freelancers had, it seemed, continued to believe him, to the point that even Connecticut believed that the sometimes narrow-minded UNSC patriotism of 'us vs. them' applied to their own missions regardless of the amount of collateral damage that ensued. This made Hargrove even more determined to bring Church to justice, although it was with a sort of fascination that he looked back on Connecticut's obvious fear of and respect for the man. While she worked against him, she never underestimated him.

Confirmation was all that Hargrove had needed, but he left Charon corporate with the distinct feeling that he had missed something, or been asking the wrong question. He fiddled with his cufflinks as he waited for a taxi, staring at the leafy trees across the street.

-

The next time CT contacted the Leader, she used her own slate and simply found a hidden corner, near the engines of the ship, in which to put her back to a wall and talk at the bright screen that cast reflections up against her helmet.

"I dreamed that I killed someone. I saw her face slack, black and blue and pink. Something about the skin..."

She did not tell him outright that it was the woman he had been standing with in the Insurrectionist base many weeks ago; if he figured that out from her mention of it before, then maybe she would find whether she wanted to talk about it. He grunted and averted his eyes down and to the left, toward his heavy gray and red armor.

"Listen, Connie. You have to know something."

"What?"

"I got a call from the Oversight Committee yesterday, the same people you talk about."

"They asked you something?"

"They asked corporate. They were trying to corroborate your story."

She hesitated before replying with the most positive of the many responses she felt. "That's good. That means they're working."

"Yeah, but I'm worried that they might think we're doing something wrong. They asked a lot of tactical questions about the freeway." He sounded uncomfortable when he talked about it, which she understood. She rubbed at the back of her neck.

_Why would they think that? Why would they hint that, if not for the same reasons CT had thought of it before?_

"About what kind of weapons you had, about basically why we couldn't beat you. He seemed really interested in how Carolina and Texas moved so quickly."

She wanted to say something, but couldn't decide between conciliatory or carefully informative. Possibilities stretched out like interconnected radio channels. The Leader switched tracks before she needed to decide.

"You've got to remember, Charon is just a job," the Leader said. "I don't want to get in over my head. That's why we have to leave, soon."

_Just a job._ The sentiment was so different from York and North asking whether the Freelancers were 'the good guys,' but it also meant somewhat the same thing - that the Leader did not want to be blamed, did not want the spotlight on him while CT was pointing a flashlight at the Director's secrets.

"Not just yet."

"You know the Director's going to find you soon."

"I know." _We both know. That's why you're saying it._ "But I need to do this right. I'm not playing around. Tex still needs to know that she was part of the Alpha."

"So leave her a message. You said you had the data compiled."

CT did. She had captured it in a USB she had hidden inside her dog tags. It had taken tense hours to create a hollow in the thin compartment.

"What do you think the Oversight Committee has on you?" she said.

"I don't know. Could be anything, from how many of our guys are stationed where, to just the fact that I talked to you."

"The Director will know what I have soon, but not yet." She was almost sure. "And you just told me that Charon knows. So that's one more group of people that I can't guarantee the Director or the Counselor won't talk to. It'll be soon, Joshua. It has to be."

He signed off quickly after that, and she was glad of it; she needed to go triple-check her security, from the data mining she had done on the Mother of Invention's network to the dog tags hidden at the bottom of her kit bag under neatly folded shirts and socks. 

* * *

><p>The Oversight Committee shouldn't have had time to free her.<p>

That, of all the rationales swirling around inside CT's head, was the one that got her to research Malcolm Hargrove. The hunch that he had taken her on as a pet project, the suggestion, based on his activity as well as on Joshua's, that Hargrove was paying a lot of attention. Maybe he was just a considerate, diligent employee.

CT didn't trust that.

And she found, in UNSC files she was allowed to pull out of storage, correspondence between the Assistant to the Subcommittee Chairman and Ingrid D'Atombe.

_I have growing concerns about Charon's purview..._

_...and related queries about Project Freelancer. The accounting anomalies in the FML ledger have been corrected. Please see the attached deck._

The Oversight Committee shouldn't have stalled, shouldn't have agreed when she said she needed more time. Hargrove was busy, she knew. He wasn't busy with her. Judging by the black net boards and underground messages from potential deserters, the whispers passed just under the UNSC's nose, he wasn't busy with anyone else, either. The Oversight Committee had been stalling, and maybe it was just volume. Maybe it was D'Atombe answering to a different master.

CT had gotten into the habit of distrusting everything, but hers was a scientific paranoia. It had to be corroborated.

It had already been sunk inside her head, not blindly pressed but slowly percolated, when she decided to leave Freelancer.

It was one of a thousand departures, one of so many breaks she had tried to make between her rational mind (they're servants, they're co-conspirators, they're being dragged along into the Director's vicious storm because they couldn't feel the raindrops) and her affection for the project that had empowered her. Each target hit, holograms turning from angry red to satisfying green, made her love what the project had taught her. Every laugh layering over nine familiar voices, every arm slung over someone's shoulders, every joke made her feel like this was a family it had taken her decades to find.

Every mistake, every fumble, the memories of the dead woman and the disastrous mission where Maryland died too, those sank into her and did something more permanent than memory - they disappeared, became something CT couldn't examine.

Because of them, she examined everything else.

Near the end (there were so many ends,) she left a rec room where York and North were playing handheld video games on a couch with a snapped leg, and South was doing endless pull-ups with Maine spotting. Wash caught her arm, fingers sliding on the pocked surface of her bodysuit until they caught at the crook of her elbow. He asked her about a tactical puzzle that had faced them earlier, and his voice slipped and clouded. She flopped her arm until his hand released. "Not now, Wash."

"Oh. I thought you were heading to this part of the room," he said, awkward.

"I'm taking a personal call."

His shoulders fell. "Right."

He let her go. He believed her.

CT left another message. She had already placed Tex's in the locker, waiting until she knew everyone was in the rec room enjoying their slim time of relaxation. This one she spoke just to herself, sitting in the locker room under the blue square of light from the leaderboard, daring someone to connect the obvious dots. She whispered onto a removable drive words that she could control, words that she could save, words that she could throw away and crush between metal and metal if she wanted.

"Words are important. Words are the key. I knew something was wrong with the Alpha when he started acting strangely, when the facts about the Insurrectionists didn't line up. The scoreboard was just another emotional key, something designed to keep us from comparing notes because we would be too busy competing with each other. The Oversight Committee is the same thing. The UNSC has to watch its own back, but that hasn't been done." She wasn't quite ready to commit Hargrove's name to digital permanence. "I'm not going to leave anyone out of these facts that may sound like accusations. They are mine, and no one else's. After all, I'm a freelancer."

To this file she added all of her correspondence with Hargrove, emphasizing his curiosity about Freelancer technology, as well as some of the belligerent, passive-aggressive messages between him and D'Atombe that she had intercepted. It was less a completed puzzle and more a curated look at a personality. It was something that, she hoped, would be a puzzle piece for her down the line. She had put a similar profile of the Director on the drive she left for Texas. It was beginning to be a pattern, CT thought, and therefore she would need to stop soon. She wasn't a detective.

She hadn't yet found out the delivery method for this information, but she would.

She sat back, then propped her chin on her hands and squeezed the edges of her helmet as if she could work them into a new shape. She knew how to be a soldier and a spy more than she knew how to be a detective. Maybe, soon, she could follow the trial of the AI and find out where the blueprints for him had come from. Do some solid spying, if not some solid soldiering. The Director had maps in his files of underground facilities and bases on alien worlds so remote that, CT had discovered, even his sim trooper program hadn't stretched out that far.

After that, she could think about retreating to the safety Joshua talked about with increasing desperation.

Time, for CT, was both critically important and entirely inconsequential. She had planned for both.


	5. Chapter 5

Hargrove's first upward maneuvers were accidental and lucky. He happened to be in place when the chairperson moved to an administrative position more central to the UNSC, happened to know how the system worked. He transferred not directly there, but through a sinecure while a fresh-faced soldier sat in D'Atombe's office and did not do the work. Some jobs stayed on his desk, and some didn't. Project Freelancer did. Hargrove was promoted.

During this time, his contact fell off the map. Charon had stolen her data, the Chairman thought. Charon had taken it for themselves; Agent Connecticut had not been right to trust them. They were a minor inconvenience while Hargrove was the Chairman, but it was because of that persistent inconvenience that Hargrove reached out to them again, hoping to gain a clearer look at what he thought was a strange, growing competitor not for resources, but for bodies. Many ex-military or disillusioned military ended up in Charon's vast security force.

That was how he got in touch with Joshua Harrington again.

The man was in and out of his career at times, but resurfaced as the shift leader of a distant, poorly funded research project. Hargrove would later find out, in conversation with the manager who had put him in touch with Harrington in the first place, that the company viewed the position in the same way the military viewed desk jobs: as both a reward and a punishment.

Hargrove got a contact number for Harrington and called a static-filled line that made the man's voice sound thin. He had been muffled last time too, Hargrove thought. It might be hard for Hargrove to recognize that voice if they ever met without outer space between them.

After the formalities, Hargrove said. "I want to talk to you about Freelancer."

Harrington let the silence hang for a few breaths, long enough to make Hargrove fidget and wonder what angle to take next. Then the shift leader said, "You might not know this, but as little as they knew about us, we didn't know a lot either." He hesitated over, but did not trip over, his words.

"Did you know about the simulation troopers?" Hargrove said.

"I don't think so."

"That's something else I uncovered."

"Why did you do all this research?" Harrington said.

"Because Agent Connecticut lead me to it, and I think she knew when to follow her hunches."

"You heard about Connie?"

It took a moment for Hargrove to connect the code name with the nickname, but he did, and wondered about turning a nickname into something affectionate. Code names evolved into pet names in the military sometimes, he imagined. Words evolved. "We lost contact with her. In situations like these, we usually - "

"She died." Harrington's anger and sadness creeped gradually, powerfully up behind his words. "She said you were going to help her."

Charon, Hargrove remembered from grade school mythology and more recent, associative research, rowed the boat that carried the dead.

The tone of the conversation changed as Harrington decided that he was the one with a mission, now. Hargrove realized that what he had been about to say would sound formal and unfeeling, but it was designed to console and to feel authoritative, not to engage with Harrington's mourning. In situations like these, we usually give our contact several chances to reach out to us before switching them to the inactive file.

"Our investigation into Project Freelancer is ongoing," Hargrove said. He would not tell this mercenary that the disbanding of most of Leonard Church's troops had actually been a boon for the Director. Church had gone into a hiding which was, if Hargrove's surviving contacts were accurate, almost as productive as his glory days as the commanding officer of a warship. "In what field are you working now?"

"Ah, the same. Security. I'm just independent now. Charon had some interest in my operation, but since the board lost a few members or something, they haven't been in touch."

Hargrove could check to see if Harrington was working for the UNSC, although that was the only data to which he had access. ONI would have more, but Oversight kept to UNSC parameters, and Hargrove had heard enough stories about ONI to be glad of it.

"The board lost members?" Hargrove said.

"Yeah, there was a big to-do about someone leaving, and then I didn't hear much more about it. I think they're hiring accountants or something. Not security people. But listen..." Harrington's voice became conspiratorial. "You can't tell me what's up with Freelancer? I know something happened."

Even if he wasn't attached to Charon on paper, Joshua Harrington had been the ferryman for the dead for some time now. He had brought Connecticut to her death, and might yet help bring Leonard Church to his. Hargrove balked at the thought of letting Church die if the Oversight Committee found him in the middle of the war, but then, Church tended to create dangerous situations. Hargrove was, after all, preventing collateral damage. Church couldn't just float on as a fugitive forever.

Hargrove asked, "What would you do if you wanted to overwork your troops to a damaging degree?"

"Make their missions harder, I guess," Hargrove said quickly, confusion catching up to his words only at the end. His voice had lost the phlegmy sound of his sadness and become more like the youthful challenge Hargrove remembered.

"No." Hargrove pressed him. "By now they're adrenaline junkies, brought closer together by challenge. Harder missions would be far too little risk and not enough reward."

"Why are you asking me this?"

"Because it is exactly what the Director of Project Freelancer accomplished, Mister Harrington. He accomplished that so efficiently that he scattered his people to the four corners of the earth. Any effort to retrieve them, or their equipment, has been...quite challenging, although the Director himself purports himself to be forthcoming in our correspondence."

The Chairman had compiled a list from Agent Connecticut's data of the experimental components that had been misplaced during the collapse of the project's most visible assets. The Alpha AI, the Sigma AI, Connecticut's own hologram enhancement...

"Don't I know that. Charon was trying the same thing."

"Were they, now?"

"The UNSC - I mean, the Freelancers - were our biggest rival. We were a technology company." Hargrove let himself feel affronted for a moment by the assumption that he didn't know that. "They had the better equipment," Harrington said. "Super speed, invisibility, energy shields - and our people got killed because of it."

Of course he was still smarting about the destruction of the Charon tower. So was most of the planet.

Hargrove said, "Then it seems like Charon and I have similar goals at the moment."

"By all means, take a seat on the board. It sounds like you have experience."

"What about yourself?"

"My job right now is...based on something different."

Harrington wouldn't elaborate, and the Chairman didn't feel that he needed to: although the former security chief going off the grid raised some red flags, it also had all the symptoms of someone mourning their losses in war. Harrington was trying to find himself. The Chairman was more interested in tying up Freelancer's loose ends. He could now check another contact off the list.

By the time Hargrove was acting CEO, by the time he knew about the cache of alien technology in the desert and by the time he could have stopped Harrington's operation if he had wanted to, it had collapsed under itself.

Before that, though, before he realized all the strings he hadn't known to pull, the Chairman exchanged several cordial letters with the Director, and then he was given command over a prison.

* * *

><p>The correspondence between the Director and the Chairman remained cordial over the next few years, although both of them hid steel knives in kid gloves. Then, Agent Washington attacked Freelancer Command.<p>

The prison was an in-between job, a test, the Chairman suspected, from both the UNSC and from Charon. The Oversight Committee had had the capacity to mobilize soldiers, but the commander of the UNSC Maximum Security Detention Facility had more direct interactions with his guards and clerks, and Hargrove thought that maybe he was being groomed for something. He maintained his title as Chairman, and some of his duties. Maneuvering among the members of the subcommittee had not lost him any tangible power, although some undoubtedly saw the appointment as a demotion. If not being groomed, he still felt that what he had learned most from the stint - surely temporary, always temporary - was that prisoners always had a story.

Of course, his many contacts, the ones like Connecticut who had attempted to call down Oversight as if it was an airstrike, had already taught him that.

The Freelancers arrived at the facility not long after Hargrove did, and the Chairman saw them both as a curiosity, as the other deserters and blood addicts that occupied the other cells did, and as a potential weapon. With the Director still at large, the Chairman liked that he would be able to pull information from Special Agent Washington if he needed it. They had not yet met face to face, though, because, for all of his credentials, Wash was not now useful. Stripped of the rank he had not utilized in Project Freelancer, he had been roaming with rogue simulation troopers for several months before his capture, and now knew the Director's mutable operation only from outside.

Wash was a traitor to the cause, and the Chairman was not yet sure how to use that. He knew he could, though, although perhaps not in the same way as he had pursued Connecticut's desperate treachery.

Wash was also an inconvenience.

Agent Maine was a different type of weapon to use, and a puzzle that the facility's psychologists were still trying to work out with methods that were, by necessity, more like a lion tamer's than a clinician's. Such was the fate of violent madmen.

In the end, Washington made an appointment with the Chairman himself instead of waiting for one.

This struck Hargrove as a useless, arrogant gesture. The Freelancer had no bargaining power at all, and he had hurt more than helped the Oversight Committee's efforts to piece together what exactly Leonard Church was doing. The search for Freelancer equipment, and the Chairman's continued efforts to thwart the Director, had stalled due to the habit of its former members to scatter themselves, like animals digging in for the winter.

The Chairman replied to the call from the cell block at a terminal in his office, both because of the secure nature of the facility, and, although it was an unspoken precaution, because Wash had been allowed to remain in possession of his powered armor. Hargrove looked out at Washington from within a bank of screens, prisoner profiles and the map of the facility. One of those profiles might also be relevant by the end of the conversation.

Wash stood rigid in his armor. His hands were shackled in front of him, but the real constriction for Agent Washington was in his posture, straight-shouldered and formal. It was almost as if he didn't know that the facility had cameras on him, that the Chairman had already seen him slouched over the cell bars with a cigarette in his mouth, his helmet hanging from two fingers. From his eyes to his hairline the former Freelancer looked like an old man, skin creased, a badly healed scar cutting into graying hair. His thin lips and round nose belonged to someone much younger, more boyish and mercurial.

"My dear Agent Washington. I am so pleased to make your acquaintance. Do come in. I feel that we have much to discuss."

"I'm sorry, do we know each other?"

Perhaps Wash had expected a military figure, a captain of the guard. Whatever he had anticipated, he was certainly not the pliant soldier profiled in his early reports. He was a terrorist against Project Freelancer, now, and from his tone of voice, Hargrove thought he needed to remind him of that.

"You are Special Agent Washington. Former member of Project Freelancer, also known by the designation Recovery One."

Wash did not object to the Chairman burying his ego in his list of names associated with crimes. In fact, he dug himself deeper.

After that, he made the Chairman's plans for him. The mention of the Epsilon unit left the Chairman mentally scrambling to put the pieces together from both the Red Team's report and Connecticut's picture of the AI, but he did not show his sudden interest on his face. Giving Wash a free ticket out of jail had not been part of his plan, but it wouldn't hurt him if he could wrap up the UNSC's investigation of Freelancer.

"I think we can point you in the right direction here."

Anything left over from Freelancer, Wash had said. "Anything left over from Freelancer could even include Agent Maine's enhancements," the Chairman said.

"I wasn't aware that they were separable. And the EMP destroyed his AI."

"His AI, yes, but not his abilities. How would you think about bringing the Meta on your mission, Agent Washington?"

Wash hesitated over his reply for a moment, catching the half-formed words in his throat. " I think that he's a dangerous murderer."

"We have made steps in communicating with him. Talking would not be a problem, despite the damage to his throat and brain."

"Do what you want." Wash straightened up, looked around a little instead of straight into the camera.

"Rest assured that I will."

Wash did not seem to hear him. "Huh. Left over."

Hargrove said, "Now, I just have one more question for you."

He received no answer. The former Freelancer was looking down, his helmet inclined to his right. Hargrove briefly imagined that he was seeing through the screen to the schematics on Hargrove's left.

"Agent Washington. Agent Washington, are you listening to me?"

With a jerky movement, as if he had been pulled by a string, Wash looked up. "Hm? Yes. I'm listening."

"Agent Washington, when you find these blue soldiers that you're talking about, what makes you think that they are just going to give you the Epsilon unit when you ask them for it?" 

* * *

><p>He waited, afterward, sitting in his office with his slate in front of him and his fingers hovering over the place where the communication from the gate, when it came time to let Washington out, would surely appear. Beside the slate sat a framed digital photograph of his family, an aunt and some family friends in the UNSC, who had, at his father's funeral, told him that they were as close as blood and would support him in any way they could. The air conditioning pumped into the facility was cold enough that it made his joints stiff, but he knew that the weather outside was hot and dry enough to be uncomfortable.<p>

He swiped over to a photo of Connecticut he had found during his research. Caught mid-movement but fully armored, she was a brown tower half shadowed. She wouldn't approve of his actions, he thought. It was too much like the Director of him to order Washington into a situation in which he was being manipulated.

Wash has accomplished great things, he thought. And he would come out of this mission in a slightly more advantageous position than when he had started.

Hargrove watched as Wash emerged onto the snowy road outside the facility, stumbling at first as if he was drunk. Then he adopted a more intentional zig-zag sweep across the wide road. This would be the first time he had held a gun in a long time. The barrel was almost hidden under the armor at the crook of his arm.

The Meta followed him in a straight line, crossing over Wash's tracks and staying between the Warthog tire marks.

Hargrove turned back to the screen, meeting the small brown pits of CT's eyes.

Anything left over from Freelancer. That had jogged his memory of the conversation he had had years ago with Ingrid D'Atombe, the former chairperson, about the Director's organizational structure and the administrative AI that was, unless the Director had been much worse at keeping ahold of his own property than the Chairman thought, probably still keeping track of things like Epsilon.

Several months ago the UNSC had searched Freelancer Command thoroughly. The base where Wash had been been found - the base where the Director had unwittingly pushed Wash into the Chairman's hands - had been an almost instantly depleted source of information since the EMP blast had fried the working computers. Specialists not unlike CT had tried to salvage what they could from the picked-clean skeleton of the base's systems. They had found nothing.

Someone would have to work harder. Maybe it would be Wash. Partnering him with the Meta would keep Wash on his toes, the Chairman thought. Making sure the two remained in tense cooperation with each other would keep them both attuned to the importance of their mission. Unfortunately, that wasn't in the Chairman's hands any more. He looked at CT again, and silently thanked her for helping him find the AI.


	6. Chapter 6

His chance came a long time later. In the end, the acquisition of the administrative AI was a simple tug. Project Freelancer had been declared dead, its participants feted or black marked. The Director's body had been found, and would be buried, quietly, in a military cemetery. The Chairman felt a small amount of sadness that it was not him who had brought the egotistical scientist to his end.

The AI, though. He had that, now because it was public. After the sim soldiers from Red Team had removed the head of the project, everything else had come falling out.

The administrative AI just needed to be retrieved. Hargrove sat in an office in a military complex, at a small desk that had been dragged in by two of the door guards. Hargrove had thanked them and taped a photograph on the wall, a curling newspaper clipping of the congratulatory ceremony from Hargrove to the simulation troopers. It had been quick and cursory. The fact that the troopers wore their armor meant that Hargrove didn't have to look at them long, and they were busy tripping up stairs and hamming in front of reporters anyway. A few of them seemed nervous, the leader of the blue squad tending to inch behind the slightly shorter red sergeant and another blue soldier keeping such careful, respectful distance from the others that he bumped elbows more often than not.

The photo was the only one on the wall. Hargrove plugged a drive into his computer and pulled up a pathway to the Director's administrative AI.

After the fall of the program, it had been much easier to find the AI, regardless of the consoles that had been wiped at Freelancer Command. Now, Hargrove could finally speak with it, and he expected its transference to be simple. It was only going to another branch of the UNSC, after all.

He had made plans in case it acted otherwise, though. He moved his right hand from the end of the drive to scratch the skin behind his ear.

Dials and graphs filled up the right half of the screen, leaving the left for him to type in commands. One string brought up the fact that the AI existed in the system. Another allowed him access to the back end encryption - not the personality or avatar of the AI or anything so anthropomorphized, but the code behind the Freelancer machine.

/Director level access.

He plugged in codes he had been taught and others that he had learned on his own.

The screen in front of him showed blue letters on a black background, but more important was the hologram that bloomed from the table, an indistinct collection of waves and spikes. If this was the physical form the AI had chosen, it wasn't a representative one.

The feminine voice crackled through the first few words. "Hello. I am the Freelancer Integrated Logistics and Security System. You may call me F.I.L.S.S. It is a pleasure to meet you. You have used an unauthorized access."

"Hello, FILSS."

"Chairman Hargrove. The Director has received many of your correspondences."

"I am sure that he has."

"You should not be able to access my root menus like this. It is very rude. Beginning emergency shutdown protocols."

He turned his attention back to the screen, watching the code repeat itself over and over. "I'm sorry, FILSS. The protocol is complete."

"That is very...unlikely, Chairman. Many of my facilities are programmed to self-destruct at a level of a breach like this."

"Only the ones that have already been destroyed by the EMP. The Director valued his research above all, did he not? I would almost have admired that, if not for his disruptive conduct elsewhere."

"Get out of my systems."

"I am afraid I cannot do that. And an attempt to lash out will be met with...oh, I see you've found it."

The blue hologram writhed in representational struggle, but a red mist formed next to it and writhed too, then curled into a noose around FILSS.

"There is the wall," Hargrove said, growing tired of talking to the computer. "It will limit your functions until you decide to be more cooperative."

"No." The voice had an almost human whine.

Hargrove pushed back his chair. "Thank you for your assistance, FILSS."

"You're not the first one to try this, you know."

Hargrove glanced at the screen. There was more vindictiveness in that than he expected, more inconvenient humanity. Was it not like an AI to want to explain things just to cause pain for the listener or catharsis for the speaker? "That is unimportant."

"The Director tried. Some of the processes he developed worked for both smart and..." She tutted. "Dumb AI programs. Have you gone through the records of those instances?"

"Do not presume to invite me into a trap by baiting it with information."

Her voice grew light and lilting. "I just wonder how much of your own correspondence is out in the open now that Freelancer is, technically, disbanded."

What did she think of the morality of Freelancer, Hargrove wondered? But he would be giving her too much credit in terms of her ability to have original thought if he pursued that path. The Director's plans were sometimes stunning in insane scope, but that did not mean that Hargrove had to worry about this particular AI, which was in essence a robot designed to be able to communicate conveniently. He had others to worry about, if he went down that road, including his own restraining program. That one, casting its red light in front of him, shouldn't be a cause for worry.

Freelancer was disbanded, finally. He had not ended it himself, and there was something anticlimactic about that. Something had quietly resonated up from Leonard Church's death by his own hand and was still affecting Malcolm Hargrove.

"The Director is dead, FILSS." Hargrove couldn't resist twisting the knife. "There is nothing technical about that statement."

"Were you aware, for example, of the other entities involved in the project, besides the UNSC, Project Freelancer, Blue Team, and Entry Missing? Oh, I believe I still need to repair that memory."

The missing entry was Red Team: Hargrove had figured that out early on. He narrowed his eyes. "I do not believe I am familiar with the assertion that any others existed, except for the Charon Corporation, of course."

The temptation to imagine Church looking at him from behind his administrator's shapeless avatar was strong, but, Hargrove knew that it was also ultimately useless, and born of more vengeance than pragmatism.

He said, "Although, I know that when we last communicated, I still had an agent inside the Freelancer Project."

"Yes. I would recommend that you task me to search for her data. It could contain information that may be more relevant now than ever, that could even pose a danger to your plans."

What plans? he thought. What did she think he was doing? "I will search for them by myself."

"Good luck," FILSS said, and Hargrove pressed a button on the console that activated the watchdog.

FILSS screamed. It was all still representational, Hargrove knew: the scream was really a measure of the program's success, displayed in a way both instantly recognizable and wry. "You will not play games with the UNSC," Hargrove said.

"I would never," FILSS said. "And I'm sure neither would you."

He shocked her again. He thought about whether the information that Connecticut had possessed even mattered now. The government had launched an official investigation into a corrupt project, utilizing a whistleblower who would have been subject to restitution if she hadn't been killed. To her parents, she was a casualty of war. If they found out that there was more to it, they would also find out that she had been more of a hero than they had imagined, and that she had been on the side of right but working from the inside of the rebellious, cancerous project.

That night, he began thinking about how best to implement FILSS. 

* * *

><p>Good people don't sleep well.<p>

Connecticut had said that once, in an idle moment, to FILSS. The Chairman discovered this when he had the AI flag all instances of communication between herself and the deceased double agent.

The Charon Board of Directors had indeed lost people. New spots were competitive, but there was also a desperate edge to the stakeholders' attempts to fill them. Perhaps it was manufactured internally, or perhaps a part of the public's growing mistrust of the UNSC now that the Great War was over and the threat of alien attack not so imminent.

When prompted to elaborate, she had replied that guilt and goodness were connected. Good people agonized over anything they might have done wrong. The evil did evil in peace, and slept secure in it.

In his first few weeks as a member of the board, Hargrove slept well. He saw the resources Charon had at its disposal, the weapons and security teams and research and development firms on several different planets.

The more involved he became, the less he slept. Paperwork suited him. His ability to form people into effective teams almost without thinking about it served him well, too. Some of his own plans surprised him: he saw them forming at a distance, at first, as if they belonged to someone else, and then realized what last pieces needed to be put in place.

By the time he was named CEO, riding in part on his success extracting information from FILSS, he had become comfortable and knowledgable about the company enough to become bored. He lay awake wondering what threads he had missed, what parts of the Director's empire he had not torn down. He drew more from FILSS, drew more from the recordings of Connecticut that the Freelancer had not destroyed. With the collapse of the Covenant, caches of alien weaponry both known and unknown to mankind's former enemy were now open to the Charon Corporation.

With a new focus for his obsession, Hargrove slept at odd hours, hopping between day-night cycles on different planets, planning to return to Charon what the Director had stolen from the UNSC, and therefore from him.

When he slept, he slept deeply, and dreamed of pharaoh's tombs filled with traps. 

* * *

><p>Metal-rich Chorus called to Charon.<p>

The planet had had its own wars, and it was easy to use the existing infrastructure (space pirates and junk dealers) to start a flow of ancient alien weapons to Charon's labs.

Chorus had war after war without any assistance. Hargrove simply ingratiated himself. With the administrative AI's help, he identified the mercenaries that had sown the most trouble. Felix he would not speak to directly: one of Felix's advantages was that he was not known as untrustworthy. It would not suit him to be publicly seen as someone's agent, and therefore Hargrove did not consider the possibility.

Locus, Hargrove found, was a blunter instrument if not a less complicated creature.

In his aggressive vanity, Locus tried to make a theatrical entrance. Hargrove did not let him.

Hargrove had found out about Locus because he was famed as a soldier in the cvil war. That war would need to be made larger quickly, not smaller, Hargrove knew. He quickly found out the war's advantage as a smoke screen when his own landing was noticed by the Federal Army before it was logged by the Charon Corporation.

It was the sense of freedom then, as he stepped off the ship onto a silver dock surrounded by mountains and pine forests, that he realized how much he wanted revenge against Freelancer: for its drain on UNSC resources, for its theft of Charon equipment, for the time he had wasted chasing Leonard Church's insane goals, and how much time he still had to waste.

The Federal army invited him to speak with a newly-appointed general.

Setting himself up as an entity rather than a corporate or military representative was essential to the element of secrecy. Locus and Felix were already ingratiated with the Federal army, so Hargrove invited Locus to his room in a hotel that had been exclusive before the war and was now a convenient place to house diplomatic visitors.

Locus tried to fight cordial guards, tried to lurk in well-lit hallways.

Hargrove received him unarmed and bare-headed, and remotely. Locus looked down at a comms units on a spindly table in the hotel room, his arms folded.

"Where are you?" The mercenary turned his helmeted head back and forth, taking in the fragile furniture, the window slightly open to the dusty street.

"I am a man prepared to pay you handsomely to do what I tell you," Hargrove said from a Charon ship. "Have you heard of Project Freelancer?"

"The brilliant, doomed whims of the knife's edge." Locus paused. "The Federal Army has supported me well."

Hargrove had expected the poetic speech, but its suddenness was strange to him, as if the hotel had regained its former grandeur only once Locus arrived. He forged on as usual. "And my goals do not contradict those orders."

"Who are you, exactly? Who is giving these goals?" Locus said.

"I'll give you a name when you give me an answer," Hargrove said.

"My men can trace your call." Locus' broad Chorus accent thickened with stress or anger.

"And mete out justice? That's exactly why I chose you and your associate." Hargrove let Locus wonder how much he knew about Felix in particular instead of the many mercenaries in general. "You know which fights are profitable to you, and which goals may be more noble but less...convenient."

"How much?"

Hargrove named a sum. "More for high-priority targets, including weapons and technology discarded on this and other planets."

"You know that I do not work alone. The fee will be doubled."

The formality was beginning to tire Hargrove. "Either you will have the money, or you won't."

"Either you'll have my gun or you won't," Locus countered. "You said this project is dead?"

"It is disbanded."

"You seem awfully keen to drive it into the ground," Locus said. He tipped his head, and Hargrove imagined the eyes behind the helmet narrowing.

(Maybe, Hargrove thought, when a madman told him to let go, he should listen. Or maybe he should stoke the fire, should tell Locus about Agent Washington's devastated past and improbable survival and send both of his attack dogs snapping at each other from the end of their leashes.)

"We will compare information and you will help me recover the remnants of Freelancer. Misguided as it may have been, its technology was unique, as are the weapons found on Chorus." Saying those words, Hargrove convinced himself again. "I can offer you more, too. Charon Corporation guns, for both you and the Federal army."

"What's so important about this Freelancer?" Locus asked. Later, the Chairman would think there was a note of defensiveness in his tone, a needless emphasis on the why instead of the how. Locus was sensing a larger predator in the ecosystem, and he didn't like it. The Chairman would have to manipulate Locus without falling too far into the black hole of the soldier's mentality: the idea that poise meant something.

"You will find its members to be accomplished soldiers, with some exceptions. Humans used to reaching beyond themselves to become something else, bolstered by this technology usually reserved for starships."

"You sound like you admire them."

I'm speaking your language, Hargrove thought. "Some survivors were recently commended for their services to the UNSC, but they must not be allowed to live. Their proprietary feelings toward the equipment I seek have been getting in the way of the acquisition of new technology." As a Chorus native, used to picking through the scraps of older civilizations for bigger guns, Locus should understand that.

He chuckled as if he did.

After that, they talked a lot about payment, back and forth, and specificities, and so Hargrove had himself a contract killer. 

* * *

><p>The data about the Oversight Committee had not been the only thing CT had put in place on the Mother of Invention.<p>

Years before Hargrove knew Chorus by name, CT stood in a black-walled prefab control center under the red emergency lights of Charon's Longshore shipyard. She had already prepared herself for her teammates' arrival: the two pistols oiled and loaded, the serrated knife.

"We've got to go," Joshua Harrington said.

CT knew that she would try to avoid killing anyone she knew: she was neat, so it might be possible. She'd get desperate against Tex and Carolina, though, or pull her punches against Wash (who did not forgive such mercies.)

She said, "There's one more thing."

He looked at her, twitchy, over his shoulder.

There was a worm, a hunter-killer sequestered in a pocket of memory FILSS rarely accessed. It had been one of CT's first ideas, a crude but quiet burn-it-to-the-ground program. One trigger in her helmet and one in the Mother of Invention. Each could work alone if she had enough time, but they were best and most thorough in concert. An EMP, targeted to impossibly precise locations, would have the same result.

"And that helps us?" Harrington said.

"No. It isn't meant for onboard armor systems."

"But you do have it with you?"

"Part of it. Stored in my helmet."

The mention of storage jogged her memory, bringing back the silver-blue walls of the room in which she had done the coding. The worm lurked there, biding its time. Something had gone wrong, though. One command contradicted the rest. She furrowed her brow, gulped in the rubbery air inside her helmet. It might work, but that was probably a 50 percent, 75 percent chance if the Director's systems didn't detect the flaw.

He had been right about her.

There was no reason to tell Joshua that it might not cripple the Mother of Invention. No one had been relying on that particular program to activate, not even CT. Now it was an unreliable back-pocket weapon dedicated to her helmet's circuitry.

Metal collided outside, followed by a descending wave of perforated sound. Gunshots, probably standard DMRs. The walls made the sound flat and wide, but CT thought she heard another kind of retort, too, an almost liquid scream.

"We can think about that later," Joshua said. CT had already moved on in her mind, had already agreed with his earlier assertion that getting out of the shipyard by way of back passages to the waiting Pelican was the best idea.

The Oversight Committee was watching her, and whatever they were up to on the side, that meant that the UNSC had a hand in the game. Her allies there would help her pick up from where she had left off when she and Joshua reached the Staff of Charon.

CT met his eyes. He turned away as if she had pushed him, and she left the control room behind.

As they walked, the Leader talked to his team. Because of this, CT knew when the Freelancers had breached the inner complex. Joshua picked up two soldiers with garish paint and machine guns: too loud for CT's taste, but it would do for another run, another retreat from people she knew so intimately.

The gunners split off when Carolina entered the building. CT ran, the armor cushioning and pushing her steps so that she outpaced Joshua without thinking about it. When she looked back, the gray and red loyalty colors of his armor reminded her of the woman North had killed in CT's efforts at subterfuge. Everyone in this building was just like her - a distraction from someone else's plot. Whether that plot's was the Oversight Committee's, she didn't know. There were many years research ahead of her, and a chance that the erasure worm might work.

The people who had died in Project Freelancer had been overlooked by the man who had renamed them and murdered them. At the same time, people who had died in Charon had been killed by even more than the usual misunderstanding and chance of war. CT could imagine herself in several years becoming an old veteran obsessed with the omen and pomp and nobility of those deaths.

She kept running. She and Joshua would leave the Staff of Charon and travel to the ruins in the desert. Hargrove would need to know about that too, depending on who owned the site. There was always another piece of information to gather, always another connection to make.

She kept running. 


End file.
